This thread is the continuation of What Book Are YOU Currently Reading? PART IV, to inaugurate the newly reopened Personal Consumer Issues subforum and start fresh after 1500 posts in the previous thread. Reading is my favorite leisure and recreational activity.

I just finished The Greek Achievement by Charles Freeman.

Now reading Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles.

Postscript: For those interested, here are the first four parts of this thread, dating back to April 7, 2007, with more than 3500 total posts:

randomwalk wrote:This thread is the continuation of What Book Are YOU Currently Reading? PART IV, to inaugurate the newly reopened Personal Consumer Issues subforum and start fresh after 1500 posts in the previous thread. Reading is my favorite leisure and recreational activity.

"The Lost Continent." Bill Bryson. He drives his mother's Chevette around the United States in 1987 in search of the perfect small town. He ends up where he started, but in the interval reviews truck stops, state troopers, and Motel 6.

Muchtolearn wrote:I am finishing the Lost Symbol, hopefully today. By Dan Brown. Unbelievably good and interfering with my work and life.

I thought this was a great book with a so-so ending. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it being hard to put down. Dan Brown always has those cliffhanger chapter endings, making it difficult to stop!

"Beware of little expenses, a small leak will sink a great ship" - Poor Richard

My wife and I have different-colored bookmarks and are taking turns with Believing the Lie, by Elizabeth George. It's pretty tough, because I also have Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and they're both due back at the library in 2-1/2 weeks and not a chance either can be renewed.

If you like narrative biography and Russian history, it doesn't get any better than this. Would also recommend any of Massie's previous books: Nicholas and Alexandra (2000), The Romanovs (1995), and Peter the Great (1986). All feature outstanding historical research, excellent attention to detail and interesting human dramas.

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam. I miss David, such a great historical non-fiction writer.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Not a bad read at all. Who knows, maybe they will make a movie out of it!! :lol: :lol:

11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King. This turned out to be in my top 3 of Stephen's books. Quite a different book for him. You definitely feel that you are with Oswald on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas on 11/22.

Hex by Allen Steele. The rebellious former Earth colony of Coyote has received an offer from the mysterious advanced alien Danui of a world for humans to colonize in the Danui system. A survey team is dispatched there, where they find it much different that expected.

Just finished "Our Daily Meds" by Melody Petersen and "Overdosed America" by Dr. John Abramson. Nothing new; I enjoyed Abramson's work more as he was actually a highly respected physician and seemed to be more objective than Petersen when examining the data. Up next, "The Survivors Club" by Ben Sherwood. Almost done with the 90 or so books I got through the Border's liquidation.

Muchtolearn wrote:I am finishing the Lost Symbol, hopefully today. By Dan Brown. Unbelievably good and interfering with my work and life.

The thing about Dan Brown's books is they are almost believable. He weaves in enough truth to overwhelm the fiction, and you just have to remind yourself you are reading fiction.

Right now I'm reading The Night Eternal by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan. It is Book III of The Strain Trilogy, so I might go back and read the first two books. Not a bad read, all in all, if you like disaster/vampire/end of the world as we know it kinda books.

Less scary than the economy!

Sam I Am

This has nothing to do with your post but rather your avatar. GO Bulls!

Last edited by Juniormint on Wed Feb 29, 2012 10:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Recently listened to 'The Emperor of All Maladies: Biography of Cancer' by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Was amazing. Must read for all medical professionals at the very least. Just finished reading 'The Age of Wonder' by Richard Holmes which was about science in the UK during the romantic period and spanning the life and times of Joesph Banks, the Herschels and Humphry Davy and their involvement with the Royal Society in London. A bit denser but very interesting nonetheless.

The Emperor of All Maladies is not to be missed.

'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so!' Mark Twain

Vulture's Picnic by Greg Palast. I'm about half way through. Exposes unethical and criminal practices in the energy industry, especial big oil. Some may find the raw language and/or political comments in the book offensive. But on the other hand it is both informative and entertaining.

Just finished "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel. Enjoyed it.
Just started "The Lemon Tree" by Sandy Tolan. Subtitle is "An Arab, a Jew, and the heart of the Middle East". 100 pages in and looking forward to discussing it at my wife's next book club meeting.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps,
chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed
by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly
cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly
through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey
slum houses running at right angles to the-embankment. . . At the back of one
of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up
the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose
was blocked. I had time to see everything about her--her sacking apron,
her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train
passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale
face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and
looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the
second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have
ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that' It
isn't the same for them as it would be for us,' and that people bred in the
slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not
the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was
happening to her--understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it
was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum
backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe. The Road to Wigan Pier

Generally, the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories. |
- Felix Cohen

I just finished reading Overdiagnosed Making People Sick In The Pursuit of Health by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch.
Dr. Welch says that due to several factors such as fear of lawsuits, highly sensitive machines that can pick up the smallest abnormality, and profits made from screenings that no abnormality is overlooked. The result is that people are sometimes given medications or surgery when they may not need it. I was recently talking to a friend who is a physician and he says that he does practice defensive medicine because of fear of lawsuits.

I read Shantaram a few years ago and it is sitting on my night stand again. The first page is stunning and it is hard to put down.

I finished the Catherine the Great book by Robert Massie a few months ago. I thought it was not nearly as good as Peter the Great and Nicholas & Alexandra, both of which I thought were excellent.

I just reread The Last Lion, the first volume of the Winston Churchill Biography by William Manchester. It is very long, but it might be the best biography I have ever read, certainly in part because Churchill is so entertaining. The opening lines are gripping:
"The French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back toward the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque.
Behind them lay the sea."

You can't a judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can judge by the first page.

"The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America," by industrial historian Maury Klein (2008, Bloomsbury Press). Colorful, entertaining account of how steam engines and the development of the electrical power grid in the 19th century changed everything. Includes fascinating details of the development of investment markets, and how the super-wealthy, who had previously invested only in real estate, discovered that they could make fortunes by investing in utility co. bonds as well as factories. Great, engrossing read!

"Throw Them All Out," by Peter Schweizer. Make sure your toilet works before attempting this short book. You will be heaving a lot. It documents the insider stock tips, land deals, and cronyism in government. If you do not believe in passive investing, this book is for you. It is a road map for successful active investing.